ESET’s researchers recently encountered a piece of malware targeting the filling of the forms belonging to the Consulate of Poland. To understand why it is first necessary to have a brief look at the application process for visas.

The attack which knocked the PlayStation Network (PSN) and Xbox Live offline over Christmas appears to have been a publicity stunt, designed to gain notoriety and draw attention to the hacking group which has claimed responsibility – Lizard Squad.

Malware or malicious computer code has been around in some form or other for over 40 years, but the use of malware to take control of a group of computers that are then organized into something called a botnet is more a twenty-first century phenomenon.

FBI names as “Most Wanted” the leader of cyber criminal gang based in Russia and Ukraine responsible for both GameOver Zeus and Cryptolocker schemes, as law enforcement agencies crack down on cyber crime infrastructure.

Scans of a huge botnet have revealed that it has harvested at least 16 million usernames and passwords for email sites and other online services, according to a report released by German security agency, the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI).

A statistical tool first used in 1966 and currently used in speech and gesture recognition may hold a key to sniffing out botnets – by predicting the likely “next move” of infected PCs and the healthy computers around them, researchers have claimed.

Only weeks after Microsoft unveiled a global Cybercrime Center armed with new, hi-tech tools to combat crime, it announced it had carried out a global action leading to “significant disruption” of the Siferef botnet, a network controlling up to two million “zombie” PCs.

There is a new bot on the block. ESET identifies it as Win32/Napolar while its author calls it solarbot. This piece of malware came to our attention mid-August because of its interesting anti-debugging and code injection techniques.

Microsoft and the FBI have broken up a large portion of the Citadel botnet – a network which had stolen $500 million from bank accounts in 90 countries around the world by installing keylogger software on five million machines.

The mysterious Avatar rootkit, detected by ESET as Win32/Rootkit.Avatar, appears to reflect a heavy investment in code development, with an API and a SDK available, plus an interesting abuse of Yahoo Groups for C&C communications.